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Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to the country's dissolution in 1991.
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- Vladimir Ivashko (acting)
- Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow
- Overview
- Early life
- General secretary of the CPSU: perestroika to the fall of the Soviet Union
Mikhail Gorbachev was a Soviet politician. Gorbachev served as the last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1985–91) as well as the last president of the Soviet Union (1990–91). Both as general secretary and as president, Gorbachev supported democratic reforms. He enacted policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”), and he pushed for disarmament and demilitarization in eastern Europe. Gorbachev’s policies ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990–91.
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Learn more about this Russian political party.
collapse of the Soviet Union
Read about the sequence of events that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
How did Mikhail Gorbachev become president of the Soviet Union?
Gorbachev was the son of Russian peasants in Stavropol territory (kray) in southwestern Russia. He joined the Komsomol (Young Communist League) in 1946 and drove a combine harvester at a state farm in Stavropol for the next four years. He proved a promising Komsomol member, and in 1952 he entered the law school of Moscow State University and became...
Gorbachev was named a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1971, and he was appointed a party secretary of agriculture in 1978. He became a candidate member of the Politburo in 1979 and a full member in 1980. He owed a great deal of his steady rise in the party to the patronage of Mikhail Suslov, the leading party ideologue. Over the course of Yury Andropov’s 15-month tenure (1982–84) as general secretary of the Communist Party, Gorbachev became one of the Politburo’s most highly active and visible members; and, after Andropov died and Konstantin Chernenko became general secretary in February 1984, Gorbachev became a likely successor to the latter. Chernenko died on March 10, 1985, and the following day the Politburo elected Gorbachev general secretary of the CPSU. Upon his accession, he was still the youngest member of the Politburo.
Gorbachev quickly set about consolidating his personal power in the Soviet leadership. His primary domestic goal was to resuscitate the stagnant Soviet economy after its years of drift and low growth during Leonid Brezhnev’s tenure in power (1964–82). To this end, he called for rapid technological modernization and increased worker productivity, and he tried to make the cumbersome Soviet bureaucracy more efficient and responsive.
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When these superficial changes failed to yield tangible results, Gorbachev in 1987–88 proceeded to initiate deeper reforms of the Soviet economic and political system. Under his new policy of glasnost (“openness”), a major cultural thaw took place: freedoms of expression and of information were significantly expanded; the press and broadcasting were allowed unprecedented candour in their reportage and criticism; and the country’s legacy of Stalinist totalitarian rule was eventually completely repudiated by the government. Under Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika (“restructuring”), the first modest attempts to democratize the Soviet political system were undertaken; multicandidate contests and the secret ballot were introduced in some elections to party and government posts. Under perestroika, some limited free-market mechanisms also began to be introduced into the Soviet economy, but even these modest economic reforms encountered serious resistance from party and government bureaucrats who were unwilling to relinquish their control over the nation’s economic life.
In foreign affairs, Gorbachev from the beginning cultivated warmer relations and trade with the developed nations of both West and East. In December 1987 he signed an agreement with U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan for their two countries to destroy all existing stocks of intermediate-range nuclear-tipped missiles. In 1988–89 he oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan after their nine-year occupation of that country.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Apr 2, 2014 · Mikhail Gorbachev was the first president of the Soviet Union, serving from 1990 to 1991. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his leadership role in ending the Cold War and promoting...
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Aug 30, 2022 · Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the...
- Marilyn Berger
Aug 30, 2022 · Tue 30 Aug 2022 18.19 EDT. Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader whose reforms led to the unlooked for break-up of his own country, and to the demise of communism across central and...
- 3 min
- Andrew Roth,Luke Harding
Aug 30, 2022 · 30 August 2022. Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the most influential political figures of the 20th Century. He presided over the dissolution of a Soviet Union that had existed for nearly 70 years...
Aug 31, 2022 · Tue 30 Aug 2022 19.40 EDT. Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, was the most important world figure of the last quarter of the 20th century. Almost singlehandedly he brought an end to 40...
